Scenario: You failed to see banshees coming. You do not have any anti-air up except a queen or two.

Banshees hit your base OR you scouted techlab'd starports a little late. You can do one of two things: Make a spire or make a hydralisk den.

In this scenario, mutalisks are never the counter to banshees. Why? Spires take 100 in-game seconds to complete finishing. Hydralisk dens take 40 in-game seconds.

If you elect to plant a spire, then banshees have 1 minute and 40 in-game seconds to finish destroying all your drones. If you elect to plant a hydralisk den, banshees have only 40 seconds to mess around before they have to get out.

Mutalisks do 9 damage at a speed of 1.52 at a range of 3.Hydras do 12 damage at a speed of 0.83 at a range of 5 (before the range upgrade).In otherwords, Hydralisks will kill those banshees faster than mutas will.This means, banshees will have to stop harassing you faster than if you had gone mutas.

Yes, banshees cannot attack air. So yes, it makes sense to make mutas. If you ALREADY have a spire out by the time the banshee rush hits your base (and if this is true, then you're screwed because your economy looks like shit), then yes, go mutas. Hydralisks and Mutalisks have the same spawn time so in that scenario, it makes more sense to go mutalisks. HOWEVER if not, there is no reason at all to plant a spire.

On the other hand, if you have an evolution chamber, planting spores and electing to ignore hydras and going straight to mutas is not a bad idea. But only if you have an evolution chamber already up.

As for stopping a protoss deathball with mutalisks and zerglings. This is a terrible strategy that you will never ever see past the bronze league. A proper deathball will annihilate a mutaling combination regardless of your upgrades. For those who want proof, I am willing to 1v1 them and I'll play protoss and execute a deathball.

Get used to using roach/hydra/corrupter to stop deathballs.

Bane rains should not be executed by players who do not have proper micro.In the hands of an experience player, the bane rain is a formidable force to be reckoned with. In the hands of anyone else, it is a gamble that I do not recommend.

Did a lot of work on Protoss recently, and on my second account I qualified as a Platinum Protoss... At best I'm actually a silver, but I beat some gold in my placement matches, so ... yeah. I'm not that good yet, and my only great build order is a 4 gate right now that hits at like... 6:20 if I'm doing it perfectly. I'll be working on Protoss for a while, and then Terran, if I feel like going for random. Once season 5 hits, I'll see what league I get on my Trojan Virus account:

If I still am bronze, I will switch to Protoss mainly on that account.

If I get into silver, then I'll stick with Zerg on that account.

So, my racial status is up in the air. I'm really enjoying Protoss, I have an awesome replay I wanna analyze on stream, and I actually have some information about my stream... check the Starcraft II General board.

(Only reason I beat the gold is because 4-gate is OP... but I'll keep doing it until I can master my forge fast-expand...)